The list of things that have never been done before gets shorter every year. Take, for instance, a rookie racing team setting three land-speed records in a bare minimum of six trial runs. It had never been done.

Now it has, and it was a team from Estes Park that calls itself Spankin' Racing that did it.

During Speed Week at the Bonneville Salt Flats last week, Todd Jirsa, Nicole Friel and Scott Chew each took rides on a 650-cc motorcycle that set new land-speed records. It was the first time any of them had run a bike down one of the five-mile straightaways.

On a Moto Guzzi completely rebuilt by Jirsa, the threesome, in a pair of qualifying rides each, set three new marks for motorcycles with 650 cubic centimeter pushrod engines.

Jirsa, riding first, broke the record in the streamlined, gasoline-fuel category, getting a two-trial average of 114.567.

Friel, taking the second turn, pushed the bike to over 120 miles an hour and recorded a two-run average of 120.219 in the streamlined, all-fuel category (though the team ran the bike on regular racing gasoline).

The team then took the faring off the bike and Chew ran it an average of 98.094 mph over two runs.

Six runs, three records.

And the whole thing grew out of the most innocent roots. Coming back from a vacation in Utah last summer, the Jirsas - Todd, Karen and their 12-year-old son Dylan - stopped at the famous salt flats at Bonneville for Speed Week. They had a great time.

"It was just the nicest group of people," Jirsa recalled.

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Many took Dylan under their wing. "They understand that if the Bonneville speed trials are going to continue, they have to get younger people involved."

On the drive home, Dylan asked if they could build a car and trial it.

No, Todd said, not a car. Too expensive. A motorcycle, though, seemed doable, and Jirsa spent a couple months researching which classification to target. He settled on the 650cc category.

Using the web, he located a bike - a 1984 Moto Guzzi V65SP in San Diego. Eric Mankin was dispatched to check it out, and on Mankin's recommendation, Jirsa pulled the trigger and had the bike shipped back to Colorado.

And then he spent nearly eight months rebuilding the bike, ultimately working over almost every aspect of it. The original frame, engine, suspension rims and wheels went to Utah. The engine was modified to push more air and fuel into and exhaust out of it.

Just days before departure, the bike was not running, and Jirsa replaced most of the last remaining original equipment in the electrical system.

In trial shape, the bike is stripped from its original curb weight of 375 down to 265, and it is not even remotely street legal. The steering, intended for running straight lines at high speed, turns only up to 15 degrees to either side. No lights, no mirrors, and the seat is just a hard, flat spot on the bike's back.

"The bike is made to go straight," Jirsa said.

"We took off more than 100 pounds of miscellaneous stuff," Chew said. The bike does not have a starter and has to be push started.

"It's actually kind of a handful because it has a lot of power," Jirsa said.

What makes these three new records even more remarkable is that the bike was barely modified between runs, and only six runs were needed to set the records. In fact, the bike spent more time in impoundment than in Spankin' Racing's hands.

Speed trials at Bonneville take place one five-mile strips. A vehicle is given a mile to get up to speed, then timed, with a mile to come to a stop at the end.

Jirsa said that at the end of his first ride, he had no idea that he had set a record, or even how fast he was going. In the spare landscape of the salt flats with nothing zipping by to provide perspective, 100 miles an hour does not even feel fast.

"You finish your ride and you're' really just sitting out there in the middle of the salt and nobody's around," Jirsa said.

"It took us a lot longer to get there to pick him up because we're only doing 40 miles an hour and he's just done it at 100-plus," Mankin said. "So he stands there for five minutes alone."

Racing on the salt flats was a singular experience, Friel said. "It's magical. I had a grin the whole time I was riding. Then you stop and its so quiet."

"I was nervous right up to the point I hit second gear, Jirsa said. "After that all you can think about is getting in behind the faring and going as fast as you can."

After a potential record run, the vehicle is impounded overnight and inspected. After a second run, if the average speed breaks the existing record in the classification the bike is entered in, the bike is impounded again for inspection. Inspection crews have the right to tear a bike apart and test the fuel to ensure that it is what it is supposed to be.

"As soon as we were signed off for the first record, we made modifications and went right back to the racecourse," Jirsa said. "We never got the bike back to our pit."

The modifications between record runs were minor. In Friel's record runs in the open fuel category, they burned gas. The faring came off for Chew's record.

"You can run anything in it but we ran race gas because we hadn't tested anything else," Jirsa said. "Had we done testing with alcohol or nitrous we could have gone even faster."

In the end, the team broke - shattered, actually - two standing records and set the record in a category that had been vacant. Jirsa's 114.567 mph average in the gas classification broke pushed the old record up from 102.795. Friel, who has been riding for about six years and said she got the second ride because she was the lightest, broke the old record in the all-fuel classification, 101.641 mph, by more near 20 percent.

"I was just the jockey," she said. "It was all about the bike."

Even without the faring on the bike, Chew nearly pushed it past the 100 mph mark to establish the benchmark in a non-streamlined, open fuel category.

Lest you think this was all done on a whim, make no mistake that there are some motorheads in this group. Jirsa used to do a little desert racing, and Friel and Chew are recreational motorcyclists who ride off-road and raced in the Baja 500 last year.

The team is already talking about plans for next year, and eyeing some long-standing marks in the 750-cc class.